While it's not this (although if anyone wants to, er, buy it for me, I'll write a song about you or something) Rob Kapilow's "What Makes It Great" series (which, full disclosure, is put out by my label, but to be honest I wouldn't have heard of it otherwise, much less acquired it) is actually quite good. In it, he goes through pieces of classical music and tries to explicate exactly why it works, so it's a mix of music and spoken-word. The thing I really like is that he doesn't only do things like, "Oh, this is a key change here, which is good," but he actually plays out the choices the composer didn't make, so you see how it could have gone wrong, and thus, how it could have gone right. For instance, I'm currently listening to the "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" edition and he does things with the intro like show how crappy it would sound if everything was playing straight eighths behind the melody, or if there weren't trills, etc.

Also, it's creepily like the choices I make when I orchestrate stuff, but I guess that's just a validation of my love of string quartets. Dude, I need to do some more of that shit...

posted by Mike B. at 4:02 PM 0 comments